CMOC Strengthens Rare Metal Market Grip with Global Acquisitions and High-Profit Cesium, Rubidium Ventures

【SMM Vanadium Flash News】Recently, the 60 tons of aerospace-grade vanadium flakes customized by Chengde Vanadium and Titanium for overseas customers have successfully completed the whole-process quality inspection, packaging and delivery procedures, and been officially shipped to high-end overseas customers. This is a larger-volume purchase order added by the customer following the successful delivery of a 40-ton order in May, marking the continuous deepening of the strategic cooperation between the two parties. As the core basic raw material for aerospace V-Al master alloys, aerospace-grade vanadium flakes are subject to extremely stringent international standards regarding purity, impurity content and batch consistency. For the 60 tons of products to be shipped this time, the customer has put forward higher requirements for the control of key impurity elements such as chromium, silicon and iron, particle size distribution and surface quality. The company's aerospace material production line launched a special production plan two weeks in advance, optimized the smelting and processing process parameters, and implemented a "double insurance" mechanism of whole-process online monitoring and offline re-inspection to ensure that the indicators of each batch of products are better than the customer's customized requirements. In terms of delivery guarantee, multiple departments including production, quality inspection and logistics worked in coordination to shorten the gap between processes, realizing the seamless flow of the whole chain from finished product off-line to loading and shipment. The logistics team, in combination with the characteristics of high temperature in summer and sea freight, customized a special moisture-proof and shock-proof packaging solution, and coordinated shipping schedules and customs declaration resources in advance to ensure the high-quality and efficient delivery of products to overseas customers.

As Zimbabwe's easily mined alluvial chrome deposits approach exhaustion, small-scale miners are being pushed toward hard-rock lumpy chrome, a shift that Chrome Miners Association of Zimbabwe chairperson Shelton Lucas says is straining the sector's economics. Unlike alluvial chrome, which could be extracted with limited capital and equipment, hard-rock ore requires drilling, blasting, crushing and heavier mechanization, pushing production costs beyond the reach of many operators. Lucas said this cost pressure is compounded by Zimbabwe's ban on raw chrome ore exports, introduced to encourage local beneficiation and smelter investment. With a limited number of domestic smelters absorbing ore, miners have fewer buyers to sell into and correspondingly weaker pricing power, leaving them, in Lucas's words, exposed to predatory pricing from Chinese-owned smelter operators even as extraction costs climb. To rebalance the market, Lucas proposed government-backed toll smelting, an arrangement under which miners would pay a processing fee while retaining ownership of their chrome, allowing them to sell the processed product rather than raw ore at prices set unilaterally by smelter operators. Zimbabwe's Ministry of Mines has pointed to investment in mining infrastructure, energy supply and operational efficiency as necessary to sustain output, though no toll-smelting facility has yet been confirmed. Whether such a mechanism materializes will be a key test of how much pricing leverage Zimbabwe's ore miners can claw back as the sector's hard-rock transition deepens.

In late May, driven by news stimulus and expectations for future demand, tantalum prices once rallied sharply, with tantalum ore prices surging to 240–245 US dollars per ton-unit.